LookIt

The future of some email may not use email

Paul McNamara quotes me extensively in this piece on the EFF protest of Goodmail. When I say "the EFF has lost its mind", i really mean "the EFF has lost its way". In the early days, the EFF was about preventing the government from ruining the Internet commons, and preventing the government from putting walls on the frontier. These days, the EFF is more about preventing companies who have no power to regulate from doing things the EFF doesn't like. That is a huge change, and one that makes the EFF much less worthy of support.

The Goodmail case is a great example. What Goodmail is doing could lead to worse mail experience for people using the mail services of its partners. The result is those users will stop using those services. AOL has been seeing a steady decline in users for years for this very reason: email is particularly sensitive for novice users, and AOL's email is unpredictable, particularly with small mailing lists. AOL regularly shuts off access to legitimate mailing lists, and many mailing list managers now have a form letter ready for AOL users who complain to them. The letters usually say "dump AOL", although some letters more helpfully say "get a free email account at Gmail or Yahoo or MSN and subscribe to this list from there". Either way, the user sees that the experts think that AOL is a bad system. If AOL starts losing more mail due to filter refactoring if Goodmail gets popular, even more users will flee.

Yahoo appears to be taking a more cautious approach, which may be why they're doing much better than AOL. Yahoo is going to wait for AOL to make the mistakes before they start using Goodmail, and Yahoo is already saying that they mostly want to use it to mark bills and invoices sent through email as legitimate. The result will be fewer pissed-off users, and that's a good thing.

What I said to Paul about Atom is true. Many of us see blogs as just the first driver for everyone to be able to read syndicated feeds on their computers. The next major wave of syndication will be one-way business communications, some of them personalized. Do you want ads from legitimate dealers of some hobby you have? No problem. Do you want notices from your bank when your online statement is ready? No problem, and the feed will be fully legitimate. If we're lucky, it will even be digitally signed, and possibly encrypted (although that will probably take years to get right). There is lots of room for creative growth for syndication, and having a standard like Atom will help lay the foundation for it.

If MoveOn and other organizations want more assuredness of delivery of their message, they should be sending their message in channels that don't have spam.

Update: Richi Jennings at Ferris Research has an orthogonal take on the issue. "There are some quasi-political and religious groups emailing indiscriminately, and hiding under the flag of Free Speech. "

Update: One of the few voices of sanity on this topic from the non-profit sector: the Center for Democracy and Technology. "However, CDT has a very different reading of the facts surrounding this controversy. CDT does not believe the service will harm the ability of non-paying senders to deliver messages to AOL customers."

Uptime

I moved my web/mail/FTP services from a system that I owned at a local colo facility to a box at a remote facility. I am about to decommission the old box.

# uptime
 2:26PM  up 659 days, 19:26, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

The only reason that the uptime is that short is that the colo facility made me move the box from one location to another; the uptime when I moved it was another couple of hundred of days, I think.

The next time someone says that internet servers run on Windows or Linux, be sure to remind them about FreeBSD.

Not sexy

Bill Gates says "Office 12 has got more sexy new stuff than any new release we've done for ages and ages." Somehow, I doubt that Bill becomes sexually aroused thinking about any of the new features in Office 12 (which will actually be called Office 2007, even though it will probably be released in 2006, and it will not be the version after Office 11, because Office 11 will not exist). In fact, I doubt that Bill was ever sexually aroused by any of the features in any release of Office ages and ages ago. The use of the term in that context exhibits a profound misunderstanding of both "sexy" and "Microsoft Office".

More on the nature of the universe

This explanation reminded me of this one.

New Wave again

One of my favorite Boston bands from around 1980 was Robin Lane and the Chartbusters. They embodied the best of New Wave: lots of catchy guitar licks, short and improbable lyrics, pleading harmonies, and lots of energy when they performed live. I recently got a great concert of hers from 1980 in NYC as a trade for my Human Sexual Response show. If you listened to college radio on the East Coast around then, you would probably recognize one of her hits, When Things Go Wrong. (5.5 MB, MP3).

Some pre-Mardi Gras fun

For many years, I got to hear the Neville Brothers play on or around Mardi Gras. They were a great combination of sass, funk, party, romantic, and playful. Although they aren't as energetic now as they were twenty years ago, they still embody New Orleans music. From 1986, here's an extended jam of "Iko Iko" into "Do You Want to Dance" into "Day-O". (10 MB, MP3).

Recommending computers that need fewer repairs

The March issue of Consumer Reports has a very good article on buying a new desktop or laptop. If you want to see how non-geeks writing for non-geeks rate computers, definitely pick up a copy at the newsstand or subscribe to the web version and read the article.

Every year, Consumers Union sends out zillions of questionnaires to their readers asking them about which things they own, how often they break down, and how was the service they got when they got the broke-down things repaired. For computers, the results are interesting.

• For desktops, Apple had the fewest repairs needed.
• For laptops, all the major brands had about the same number of repairs needed.
• For tech support on both desktops and laptops, Apple had much better scores from CR's readers than the nearest competition.

For me, recommending Apples means recommending things that will not frustrate users. They break down less often (or the same as everyone else, for laptops), and when they break down, users have a much better repair experience. That's more important even than "they are easier to use" and "they are less prone to security issues", and certainly more important than "owning one makes you feel cool".

Paying at least twice

The clueless among the Internet service providers are seeing if they can make their customers pay at least twice for what they are paying now. Network World news editor (and my long-time friend) Paul McNamara asks a good question: Who knew that our Internet access fees were covering only the piece of pipe from our homes to the ISP? Could have sworn we've been buying round-trip tickets, but maybe I didn't read the fine print..

It's worse than that. Because the ISPs cannot even measure accurately where some "content" originated, the first one that tries to start charging more for faster transit is going to get it wrong and start slowing down their currently-paying customers traffic because of internal billing errors. The result will be that their customers will flee in droves to their competitors. Any sane ISP will wait to see how badly their competitors fail in introducing this new anti-service before trying it themselves. It seems likely that such a boneheaded move could seriously hurt at least one entrenched carrier, completely to the benefit of the others. It will be fun to see which one gets nailed first.